A big thank you to Ethan and the Evanstonian staff for the nice article about our EMPATHY Project. This is the effort to raise money for friends in Malawi, in order to ensure children have enough food for an entire school year so they can remain in school. With this becoming a national model, we hope that some 10,000 children will benefit from this program!
If willing and able, donations can always be made here.
A couple AI sites, courtesy of Luca:
Drawing one: https://www.craiyon.com/
THANK YOUs go out to everyone who helped either in school or online, where we raised a quick $1020 to send to our friends in Malawi! This is equivalent to 1.042 million kwacha, and will be used by some new schools to prepare land for planting crops as they go into their spring and planting season. Our model will help over 10,000 children once the couple dozen schools harvest their crops towards the end of their summer in 2023. Each harvest will feed the kids at the school for an entire year, and this model has largely been adopted as a national model to avoid famine and kids missing school due to hunger.
Back in 2013, a student who was in multivariable calculus wanted to apply the math to something in physics. She was a real go-getter, so I suggested she try to do REAL Quantum Mechanics and use her MV to figure out the hard-core derivation of a hydrogen atom's energy states and wave function. Katie took that challenge and ran with it!
Check out her paper!! She hand-wrote a ~30 page paper as a 'how to do QM' guide for other students. She derived everything, learned the solutions to different partial differential equations (using things like Legendre polynomials, spherical harmonics, Laguerre polynomials, etc.). It is beautiful, impressive work! Katie is presently working on her PhD in physics, and continues to be amazing.
This paper shows the power of higher level mathematics in physics, as well as the level of difficulty of QM and how impressive the scientists who discovered all this were.
Here's an interesting idea that is working in Finland:
Use SAND to store energy from sources like solar and wind energy! Called a sand battery, excess energy not being used in real time from, say, solar cells, can be stored in the form of heat for future use (such as when the sun goes down). Sand batteries are being used in towns in Finland with great success, so it will be interesting to see if this catches on in other places.
Clever ideas like this will only help with the transition from fossil fuels to 'clean' energies around the world.
Thanks to John B. who found this video: This video is from Hurricane Ian in south Florida. This is a storm surge, where the 150 mph wind blows the top layers of water from the Gulf of Mexico, and pushes it up on the land. Keep in mind that the coastline is just a couple feet above sea level, and the surge was anywhere from 8-16 feet high depending on where you look. Disastrous flooding results, and as seen in this, small buildings and homes are removed by the water.
A new study of Greenland's rapidly melting ice sheets concludes, using a conservative model, that oceans will rise at least 10 inches over the coming years/decades. While no timeline was given, this melting will occur regardless of what humans do to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The reason is that the melting cycle has already been put into motion, and the combination of warming ocean temps, water from melted ice (that then melts more ice...sort of like pouring liquid water on ice cubes in a sink will melt the ice), and the fact that warming water expands in volume, means this rise is inevitable. Also, using sophisticated radar techniques, dozens of lakes below the surface ice have been discovered - this means there is melting happening underneath the ice that we had not observed before. Often some computer models were underestimating the rate of melting, and as further research is done more mechanisms for melting are being discovered to help us understand why the rates are quickening.
What's significant about Greenland's ice sheets is that they are land-based. They are not icebergs already in the water. If an iceberg melts, there won't be any rise. However, run-off water from land is new water in the ocean, and makes sea levels rise.
This is a video showing some of the microscopes and techniques used to get images of INDIVIDUAL ATOMS!! Incredibly cool!!!
The world's rivers have had a very hard and bad summer around the world. Many are becoming impassable for shipping because they are so low, and also these are water sources for tens to hundreds of millions of people. It is clear they are drying up from so many droughts that have been in progress, especially in the northern hemisphere where most of the land-mass of the earth is located. And those droughts have been accelerated and made worse through human-induced climate change. Check out this link where you can see satellite photos of 6 major rivers in the past compared to today.
This photo is from 2019 in India - the Narmada River in the Narsinghpur Province. There's little left for this and many more farmers along that river.
This is meant for the incoming juniors for 3 Chem/Phys Mechanics. For those who want to see the slides from our Chem/Phys Boot Camp, here they are.
I can only hope you've had a wonderful, restful and fun summer! We are so looking forward to meeting you and working with you this year. We tend to have a lot of fun as the next two years progress!
While we have no summer assignments for the course, some students like to get a preview of the first week or so of the course, and in particular reviewing some of the mathematical concepts and topics we will need from here on out. This generally boils down to remembering how to do vector algebra, and starting the process of learning basic calculus (derivatives and integrals). Just about everyone will be in the same boat if you have not yet had any calculus, whether in BC/AB calculus or Pre-calculus. Don't worry, if you know how to graph and find slopes, you can begin to understand and do calculus!!
Below are some links to videos that introduce some of the math, as well as a welcoming video for the program.
Vector addition is most important for vectors. Vector multiplication we won't need for a while.
Derivatives are important in STEM from now on. These re-define things like velocity and acceleration, and MUCH more as time goes on. We'll worry about integration once school starts.
Here's a summary of the program. And for anyone who might have an interest in independent research, this summarizes our CABS site. We'll talk about this and so much more the first couple days of school!
All our videos are listed at http://docvphysics.blogspot.com/p/list-of-all-how-to-videos.html. If you want a sense of how I think about education in general, feel free to check out my new TED Talk, released a couple weeks ago (we'll talk a lot about this over time, as well as SO many other topics!). Here's my experiment from back in graduate school, one of the giant detectors at Fermilab:
